When KCRW’s Madeleine Brand came onstage at the Los Angeles Library Wednesday night to interview Tim Wu, author of the insightful new book on the history of advertising, “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Battle to Get Inside Our Heads,” she wasn’t going to ignore the elephant in the room.

“I just want to begin,” said Brand, “with the fact that a lot of you, I think, would like to talk about the election. You could call Donald Trump the ur-attention getter. How was he able to do it?”

“I’ve had a long time to think about the selling of government over the last century,” replied Wu, the Columbia University law professor famous for coining the term “net neutrality” about internet law. “Now we have the first reality-television candidate taking charge in Washington. The techniques used by the Trump campaign were classics in attention-harvesting. Step No. 1, get attention by any means necessary. … Be more outrageous, more lurid, more unusual. Trump was very successful at not getting ignored. The second thing in sales is to understand very deeply what the deepest emotions are of your audience, and to speak to those.”

Before the talk began, I had thought that Wu’s new book focused entirely on the ways ad-based social media worm into our minds to sell us stuff. But he actually began his research at the beginning of modern advertising, with the snake-oil salesmen of the American past.

“It all really comes from selling patent medicines in the 19th century,” Wu said. “Understand what your potential customers are worried about” — aches and pains, and getting to sleep, in their case. “The dark side is very effective. Give voice to things people are almost ashamed to talk about. Finally, offer yourself as deliverance. The techniques offered by organized religion: ‘I am the answer.’ Offer a sense that you can help. These are the applications of classic sales techniques. And I don’t mean that entirely pejoratively — it was very effective.”

Looking at the ads in old American newspapers and magazines, Wu said he began to see that “great salesman are born,” not made. “They are sensitive to what you want to hear.”

And sometimes, they don’t quite know how to sell their wares until they repurpose them. “Listerine,” he said, “was originally a floor cleaner. Then it was repurposed to sell to women worried about halitosis, a word the company essentially coined, who were concerned about their not being married.”

Same thing with selling tobacco to women. “‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,’” the slogan went. “Cigarettes were marketed as a diet aid. Advertising was not subtle. And one of the themes of my book is that a lot of the old techniques are the same today.”

“But we think we are more sophisticated now,” responded Brand.

“Every generation thinks it’s more sophisticated,” said Wu. “Sometimes the easiest groups to propagandize are the educated, news-consuming public. They think they know everything. The capacity for self-delusion is pretty powerful.”

Brand asked if Wu thought Facebook tilted the election because of its feeding of fake news.

“Well, the problem with Facebook is that it’s not a news organization.” said Wu. “Its only objective is the maximizing of click-through. We are starting to see the disadvantages of that approach, having no creed other than maximizing engagement.” Wu compared Facebook with the 1830s “penny press” papers. “The New York Post wrote about what was on the moon as seen through the latest telescopes. Six-part series. Forests were there, cliffs, a unicorn and a man-bat, with greater sexual appetites than ourselves. It was a story that was never retracted.”

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.

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